Gas turbines are typically large, complex machines with expensive parts that must withstand challenging environmental conditions. Building, maintaining, and operating these machines often requires a significant capital investment, and therefore, steps are often taken to ramp-up and ramp-down the turbines under careful control, in order to protect the capital investment, and operate the turbine within safe limits.
History has shown, however, that certain combustion failures can occur over a long period of time, and such failures may eventually result in catastrophic failure if they are not detected in time to ramp-down the turbine and perform corrective action. Furthermore, some failures may not be detectable in terms of usual monitoring parameters such as power output, grid frequency, or combustion modes.